A friend recently made a joke that there is two ways to ensure a business is a success – sell alcohol or give it an English name.

Dominicans share Winston Churchill’s attitude towards drink: in victory they deserve it and in defeat they need it. When times are good they deserve it, but when they are bad they need it.

I can’t think of a way of shoehorning in the other great Churchill quote on alcohol: when a group of teetotal Mormons told him that alcohol stung like a viper and kicked like a mule, he replied that he had been looking all his life for a drink like that. Although I hear that some home made rums here sting like a viper, kick like a mule, and blind like a bat, but that is a story for another day.

People get paid here on a Saturday evening and some people head straight to the corner shop to drink until Monday morning, they run out of money or they fall over, whichever comes first. No matter how bad things are, there is always money for beer. Sometimes they accelerate the wealth redistribution process by betting on cockfights or billiard games to accompany the drinking. The more they drink, the louder they shout, and the louder they have to put the music so that they have an excuse to shout so loud. As I live next to a place with a reputation for boisterous weekend recreation, this does quickly become very grating, particularly as they appear to have one CD consisting of 5 songs, which is endlessly on loop. I have decided that if I am a bad person, I will go to a kind of personalised hell that consists of a bar like that, full of drunken idiots, whilst I am eternally on antibiotics and cannot resort to hard liquor to take the pain away. Hell truly is other people, but some people more than others.

Continuing on from a previous thread about the possibility of armed insurrection in this country, the last few weeks have seen high social tensions and anti-government feeling. Since the New Year, in accordance with International Monetary Fund austerity measures to pay for the monstrous cost of constructing the Santo Domingo metro, the tax on a bottle of beer has increased markedly, so a bottle of beer now costs about 25% more than last month. Of course the men complain more about this than they do about the accompanying reduction in the subsidy for basic goods such as rice, beans and propane. Their wives have a different perspective. Interestingly, the tax hasn’t been applied to rum, perhaps because sugarcane is grown in the DR, but the grain and hops for beer are imported. Suits me fine, as the rum here is good, and the beer at best mediocre.

IMF austerity measures have a nasty history here, as in much of Latin America. Sometimes they do have positive effects on the economy as a whole, but it is almost always the poorest who feel the pinch most, and it often provokes deadly riots, such as the ones in the late 80’s that were a key factor in toppling a government.

The subject of English names will have to wait, but ask me sometime about my neighbour’s rubber boots.